I Have Arrived at the Truth

I’d like to quit talking about politics and get back to gossip and drinking, but I just can’t. The election has been everywhere the past few days: on TV, the radio, all over the web, even in a Chinese cooking blog I follow. There’s been endless analysis and counter-analysis, mostly declarations that the Democrats are finally done. In fact the Dems have been laid so low that Ann Coulter has turned on her own party, upbraiding Karl Rove for not engineering a landslide (and reminding me of the fable of the serpent who bites his rescuer because, well, that’s his nature). There’s quite a bit of talk how this is a complete repudiation of the Democratic Party; that the country has move irrevocably to the right; that liberalism is done. In a word, hogwash.

Democracy is not a football championship. Just because your team lost doesn’t mean that you should switch sides, or that your principles are wrong. In fact, quite the contrary in this election. This election was won on strategy and demonization, not principles, and it was won by playing off the worst fears and prejudices of people whose way of life is under siege. The winning party did not have a better plan for the country, they identified the fears of their base, and then projected those fears onto the Democrats to bring that base to the polls. How can we counter that strategy without stooping to the same bankrupt methods, without appealing to the worst instead of the best in Americans?

Simple. We just have to tell the truth. Here’s an example: Republicans don’t care about children, they use the issue of abortion to manipulate the voters. You know this is true because they don’t support birth control to reduce abortion, and they’re afraid to amend the Constitution to ban it. They don’t support basic sex education so people can plan for children, and they don’t support a minimum wage sufficient for one parent to stay home to care for a child. Further, they’re not willing to fund quality early education, and they make college loans a handout to big banks at the expense of new graduates. Republican policies do little to help make sure that children are born to couples who are married, stable, committed, and financially able to care for a child. “Abstinence education” is ridiculous unless kids are getting married at 18, and who is ready for a life-long commitment at that age?. Sex is part of adulthood, but the Republicans don’t seem to care if it results in single parents stuck in grinding poverty without an education or a way to care for the child. Republicans care about getting elected, and have hit on abortion as a way to divide the country and energize their base. This is the truth, and unfortunately it was never uttered in this campaign.

The truth is, the American way of life is under siege like never before. Economically, morally, spiritually. The buying power of income peaked in the 1970s and it has been dropping steadily since. A family of four could live a comfortable middle-class life on one income in the 1960s; today it requires a two earners with college degrees to begin to be middle class. Rather than talk honestly with our children about sex as they become adults, we pretend it isn’t there while they’re bombarded with it everywhere they go. Faith and spirituality are trotted out at every opportunity; injected into government and used to demonize and belittle instead of inspire and uplift. Faith is not a tool for gaining office, morals should not be molded to gain political advantage, and the government should make opportunity available to all instead of closing it off for all but a few.

There are a multiple of other truths just waiting to be uttered. It doesn’t seem hard to tell the truth about the Republicans, but Democrats have been unable to do it for the past 2 elections. And still Bush lost the last election and narrowly won this election. My greatest frustration isn’t that we’re wrong, it’s that they are and we won’t say it.